When you get deep in the weeds of any theoretical debate, you sometimes seem to float off into an abstract world where any position can seem plausible or implausible depending on your prior commitments. And the debate can go on forever, because there is no impartial umpire to say which arguments really hold water and which don’t. 

So it can be useful, sometimes, to take a step back and look around for an outside rubric to measure the success or failure of a theory. 

For that reason, I’m grateful to “Evolution 2.0” founder Perry Marshall for helpfully providing one such measure for the origin-of-life debate: money. You can talk all day, but if there’s money on the table, you see what really works and what is just talk. And since 2019, a $10 million prize has been waiting for anyone who can discover “a purely chemical process that will generate, transmit and receive a simple code” without any information snuck in from an intelligent designer. It’s not enough to come up with a theoretical model — it has to actually work. 

Show Me the Money…Or Don’t

Astoundingly, no one has claimed the prize — despite the fact that for years we’ve been fed all sorts of theoretical explanations for abiogenesis, and have been expected to accept them as reasonable alternatives to the old design hypothesis. 

When you think about it, this is an obvious way to judge such theories. If someone claims to know how to make something, the natural response is, “Let’s see it, then.” You would say this to someone who said he had cracked perpetual motion or light speed travel. Those who say they know how to make self-replicating and self-improving machines should be held to the same standard. We typically forget to, though — probably because we are used to thinking of the origin of life as something that happened in the past, not a technological challenge that could be accomplished in the future. Actually, it’s both. 

An Intelligent Design Publicity Stunt? 

Given the negative optics this prize creates, sitting there unclaimed, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for someone to suspect that the whole thing is rigged — some sort of intelligent design publicity stunt. Marshall is well aware of this problem, and has been careful to point out that neither he nor the judges of the prize are supporters of intelligent design. 

Marshall himself disagrees with ID and has debated Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer on the topic. He sees it as a “God of the gaps” argument, and likes to say that neo-Darwinists underestimate nature, but evolution-deniers underestimate God (because a universe with evolution would be much more amazing than a universe without it). 

The three judges of the prize are Harvard geneticist George Church, Oxford physiologist Denis Noble, and philosopher Michael Ruse (until Ruse’s death in 2024). Church is one of the most respected geneticists in the world, and Noble has had a highly distinguished biology career as well. Neither is an ID proponent. Michael Ruse was an opponent of intelligent design who debated William Dembski and identified as an atheist-agnostic. 

The investors funding the prize don’t seem to be just a bunch of creationist billionaires trying to prove a point, either. For example, one of the investors, Robert Skrob, has this to say: 

For too long this question has been obscured by religion versus science. The religious expect you to accept “God of the gaps” to key questions. Many scientists peddle their own theories with no more evidence than the religious. The two sides are so focused on destroying each other neither is open to exploring fundamental questions as to where we came from and how we are made… For anyone who has ever wondered, “How did I get here?” “How does nature work the way it does?” and/or “Why am I here, at this point in history?” this contest is for you…This has the potential to solve disease, hunger, pollution and possibly even death itself.

If you listen to these people, you do not get the impression that any of them are merely interested in making some point by waving an unobtainable prize around. They genuinely want to find out how evolution works, and they genuinely believe an answer is out there. They think the prize money will encourage researchers to find it. 

It’s Really Unnecessary, Though

I’m sure that the ten million is a nice motivator for some people, but the fact is, a genuine origin-of-life discovery would shake the world whether the Evolution 2.0 people gave it a “pass” or not, and would no doubt make the discoverer rich and famous. That’s probably why ten million dollars seems like a reasonable price to pay. As Marshall says:

One blade of grass is 10,000 years ahead of any human technology. If a single firm in Silicon Valley held a fraction of the secrets of this natural code inside a single cell, they’d set the NASDAQ on fire. Organisms self-edit and reprogram in real time in a way that dwarfs anything manmade. If we crack this, it will literally change the course of aging, disease, A.I. and humanity.

He’s right, of course. A setup that spontaneously generates information systems really could revolutionize … just about everything. So, really, the fairness of the prize is beside the point. Its existence doesn’t change anything. Rather, the prize merely serves to highlight what was already the case: that if any origin-of-life theory was worked and was testable, someone would have used it to create life, and gotten rich. But they don’t, and so they haven’t. 

Science vs Science 

This is an important point, because the fact that science works is what makes the label of “science” such a credibility booster (and sometimes, a debate ender). As Richard Dawkins famously said, quoting the webcomic xkcd:

How do we justify, as it were, that science would give us the truth? It works. Planes fly, cars drive, computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people; if you base the design of planes on science, they fly; if you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works, bitches.

Indeed, science does work. 

Or, to be a wee bit more exact, the scientific theories that work, work. Not every scientific theory works. Geocentricism was a scientific theory, and because it didn’t work — didn’t “put rockets on the moon” — it was discarded. Not every paradigm has produced results. 

So one might argue that, maybe, just maybe, it isn’t reasonable to give free authority to the theories that have produced no results, merely because they are “science.” And yet that does seem to be the unstated logic underlying much of the origin-of-life and evolution debates: planes fly; therefore evolution is true. Rockets reach the moon; therefore life was spontaneously generated from non-life. 

In reality, of course, “science” is just a word, a label you can slap on a lot of very different methods and ideas. The hypothesis of abiogenesis may turn out to be the kind of “science” that cures diseases, makes planes fly, and puts rockets on the moon. Or it may turn out to be a “science” more in the family of phrenology and phlogiston. 

Time will tell. But the longer that ten million dollars sits there untouched — and the longer origin-of-life theories fail to revolutionize the world — the likelier the second option will seem.